America, France and Vietnam : cultural history and ideas of conflict

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America, France and Vietnam : cultural history and ideas of conflict

edited by Phil Melling, Jon Roper

Avebury, c1991

Available at  / 10 libraries

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Description and Table of Contents

Description

Many commentaries use Vietnam as an excuse to investigate American thought and values. They ignore the Vietnamese or at best they patronize them. The central theme of this book is that these various approaches merely repeat the fundamental military error in Vietnam - which was to pay too little attention to the Vietnamese people and the structures which governed their society. The editors consider those writers who explore a different perspective, and the implications of American ethnocentrism which, it is suggested, have not only led to a justification for the legitimacy of policies of containment and the promotion of American values abroad, but which also continue to inform the political and military thinking in American life.

Table of Contents

  • Part 1: Why Americans do not travel well
  • ethnocentrism and the Vietnam experience
  • France, America and Vietnam - a comparative study
  • the West and the Vietnam War (1945-1975)
  • Western literature and polemics in relation to Indochina (1950-1960)
  • France and Vietnam - the politics and self esteem
  • France and Vietnam - the invisible war
  • promise and performance - Lyndon John son's rhetoric and war in Vietnam. Part 2: From the margin to the mainstream, the perception of Vietnam
  • the Vietnam war and rural conflict
  • air power in Vietnam - the hubris of power
  • the dissonance of technology, America in Vietnam
  • Vietnam and America - the Vietnamese in poetry
  • Vietnamese perception of the war in fiction. Part 3: the continuity of ethnocentrism
  • the image of the Vietnamese in Hollywood film
  • Vietnam and American counter-revolutionary policy, example and metaphor
  • the nostalgic ideal in American foreign policy
  • the political legacy of Vietnam
  • index.

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